Built a study tool, launched it, made $0 so far. What actually got you your first users?
I've been building StudyLoop for a few months. It's a spaced repetition thing that takes your notes or a PDF and turns them into a review schedule that actually adapts to what you keep forgetting, instead of the flat Anki-style deck where you drown in cards you already know.
It's live. It works. I use it myself for a certification I'm slowly failing to prepare for. Revenue is basically zero.
So I'm not here to announce anything. I'm here because I've clearly got the order wrong. I spent way too long on the product and almost no time figuring out where students actually hang out and whether they'd pay for this or just use Quizlet forever. Classic first-timer mistake and I walked straight into it.
What I'd genuinely like to know from people who've been through this: where did your first ten users come from? Not the growth loop that worked at 10k. The messy early part. Did you cold DM people? Post in niche forums? Give it away to a professor? I keep reading that you should do things that don't scale but nobody says what that looked like on a Tuesday.
Also happy to hear the product itself is the problem. Blunt is fine, I'd rather hear it now.
Anyway, if you want to poke at it: https://studyloop-jelonmans-projects.vercel.app?utm_source=indiehackers&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=studyloop_202608
The real insight here is that before you chase Reddit threads or Quizlet switchers, you need to answer one question: does your adaptive scheduling actually compress study time vs a flat SM-2 deck? That's your differentiator, and it's the thing Quizlet can't easily copy. If you can prove that in black-and-white numbers (10 hours to mastery vs 15 with Anki), that becomes your entire acquisition message. "Cut your study time by 33%" beats "smarter cards" every time. And if it doesn't beat the baseline? That's not a distribution problem, that's a product problem worth fixing first.
You already named the real problem in the post: product order before distribution order. I did the same — spent months building, then dumped budget into ads because "traffic = users". Spent €150 on Google Ads for a browser tool, got 0 installs. What actually moved the needle was replying inside the communities where the pain already gets described out loud. For StudyLoop that's r/medicalschool, r/anki, study Discords — students already complain about drowning in cards they know. Be useful there for a month before you touch ads. And yes to the Quizlet point: get 5 people to the point of "I'd pay to never see these 30 cards again" before deciding pricing matters.
One thing worth checking before you chase distribution: log your own review sessions for a couple weeks and compare total reviews-to-mastery against a plain SM-2 deck at the same retention target. If your adaptive scheduling doesn't beat that boring baseline by a real margin, no amount of distribution fixes the core pitch. If it does, that's a concrete number to lead with instead of "adapts to what you forget."
The useful thing about having almost no users yet is that you don't actually have to solve "growth."
You need enough contact with the right students to learn why they choose their current study method and what would make them abandon it. Ten conversations that expose that switching decision might tell you more right now than ten signups from a directory.